The Book Shopper

Baseball Bedtime Stories

One of the ways I have managed to keep the baseball flames lit in the off season is by revisiting Neal and Constance McCabe's Baseball's Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon (1993). I took it off my baseball book shelf after a recent visit to the Joe Jackson Baseball Museum in Greenville and placed it on my nightstand.

The Conlon photograph at the top of this posting has some coincidental significance. In this 1912 game, Conlon captures the action of New York Highlander Bert Daniels as  he is being thrown out at the plate by none other than Shoeless Joe Jackson. 

The book makes for excellent bedtime reading because each photograph is accompanied by a brief biographic note of the player shown or how Conlon managed to use a heavy glass-plate camera to capture the essence of baseball from 1904 to 1934. The photos are from a distant world and they can overshadow the tight and often humorous prose of the McCabes.  

One of my favorite anecdotes is the story of Charlie Root, a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs who was known for the being on the
mound when Babe Ruth called his shot in the 1932 World Series. But not so fast! Look at Root's face, then read the story about Root's nickname.

 

 

 

MARTA Book Club #33: In Praise of the Tattered Paperback

This is a shout out to that tattered paperback --- a yellowed time capsule that continues to be in circulation while withstanding the onslaught of E-books and the proliferation of audio books. Unlike more modern fanfare, these evocative paperbacks can bring back memories of our reading youth, do they not?

For my mass transit reading, I prefer the light, feathery disintegrating paperback that is easy to hold like a news magazine or a newspaper. As one who is recovering from carpal tunnel surgery and has developed some chronic ligament damage in the wrist, I have all but abandoned heavier book fare  on my MARTA  (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) commute.

For example in my contributions to this edition of the MARTA Book Club, the club whose sole participatory requirement is to read a book while riding MARTA, I recently finished the ultra- thin Albert Camus' classic, The Stranger (1942) which may be light physically, but a heavyweight in its existential indictment of humanity. And currently I am reading a mass market paperback copy of  John Hersey's A Bell for Adano (1944). This is my third Hersey book in the past few years. His writing career expanded over 50 years and  he's very underrated as a 20th century American writer.

Another mass market paperback classic that I saw someone reading was Robert Pirsig's The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry in Values (1976). Not surprising, I recognized the book from its almost sepia colored back cover of man, son, and motorcycle all gazing meaningfully at a mountain in the distance. 

Other books spotted recently while riding MARTA include:

The Windup-Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. 

Rooster Bar by John Grisham

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Over Parenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success by Julie Lythcott-Haims

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach of Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson

 The Romanovs, 1613 -1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Heavy book - you could bludgeon somebody with the 800 page hardback edition)

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit. This is a trade paperback that I just finished. Solnit has some fascinating insights about how people and communities really react to disasters in contrast to the misleading portrayals propagated by the movies and the media. Admittedly, it could have used a little editing, because Solnit seemed to bludgeon the topic, but maybe it was lack of this reader's commitment to engage in "heavy reading."

For the previous 32 MARTA Book Club postings, visit here.